Just A Question Of Maintenance

Your excellent article “The Tyranny of the Lawn” (September) left out the classic English lawn anecdote:

SCENE —Two men stand before a grand English estate lawn, acres of velvet without so much as a cloverleaf showing, clipped as a putting green, smooth as a cat’s back.

TOURIST : My, it must be a lot of trouble to get a lawn like that.

GROUNDSKEEPER : No, sir, no trouble at all. You just go over it now and then for the odd weed, and you roll it once every day.

TOURIST : Every day?

GROUNDSKEEPER : Exactly. Every day for five hundred years.